Disturbing pedagogies in special youth care

Abstract

Due to the ways in which social work practices in Special Youth Care are given shape in Flanders, these practices can lead to factual disengagements towards clients. This state of affairs lends itself to a postmodernist analysis of the fragmentation of professional care, along with an understanding of professionalism as expertness in risk control. Nevertheless, the assumption that children at risk grow into children and adults as a risk is not new. This idea emerged in the nineteenth century with the theory of Social Defence. Child Protection was developed as a resource to safeguard the existing social order. Private child-rearing and public interventions in child-rearing were regarded as instruments of socialisation, aimed at the realisation of integrated citizenship. Social work practices can take a distance from the socialising pedagogical logic of Special Youth Care, if they acknowledge that child-rearing and any pedagogical relation need unconditional engagements and that pedagogy and care are shaped by interdependency within pedagogical as well as care relations. This acknowledgement opens the possibility of changing the anticipations that are built in the settings and upon which social work practices in Special Youth Care rely. Those anticipations are reoriented from anticipations of the future realisation of improved citizenship towards anticipations of possible emergence of subjectified citizenship in the here and now of the relations that are developed in these settings. This reorientation makes social work practices as vulnerable as the consciousness of equal human dignity, present in the developed settings themselves.